The Dead Grey Eye: Vampires are hawt... and have been for decades

This one's going out to Marta Acosta over at Vampire Wire. The other day she wryly commented on the numerous "Vampires are hawt" articles that have been popping up all over the news media as of late. What I want to know is, when have vampires not been hot?

In 1989, Dr. Katherine Ramsland wrote an article for Psychology Today titled "Pop Culture's Occult Boom: The Sudden, Curious Allure of Vampires." If you want to read it for yourself, you can find it right here over at the website Vampire Junction. On a personal level, this article was influential to me because it was when I began to consider myself a "vampire fan" specifically. Sure, I had always liked monsters - vampires included - but this article was the first time I had begun to see vampire fiction as a subgenre unto itself. It was also the first time I had seen a mainstream publication run a serious look at the explosion of vampire pop culture. Sure, there had been waves of interest in the past, but it was the late 1980's when things began to coalesce - and Dr. Ramsland's article was a harbinger of what was to come in the 1990's.

The early 1990's saw a fallout in the horror publishing business, but vampire novels kept going as if nothing happened. It became difficult to find horror novels that were not written by the "big name" authors, but vampire books were still being published. Many were lousy, and many were just riding Anne Rice's coattails, but there were a number of interesting variations on the theme during this decade as well.

The 1990's were also a big era for vampires in film. Francis Ford Coppola's lavish Bram Stoker's Dracula arrived during 1992's holiday season, accompanied by an array of tie-in merchandise. Two years later in 1994, Neil Jordan's big-screen adaptation of Anne Rice's Interview With The Vampire arrived, prompting a new wave of articles spotlighting, once again, the "sudden" interest in the subject.

While all of this was going on in the mainstream, White Wolf's role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade was garnering a cult fanbase. The world of The Masquerade flirted with a wider audience in 1996 when the short-lived Fox television series Kindred: The Embraced aired.

In 1997, vampires were deemed hot again when Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series debuted to critical acclaim. Buffy ran for seven seasons, and even had it's own spin-off, Angel, which focused on a vampire lead. While I consider Buffy and Angel to be more "general supernatural" series rather than "vampire" series, they kept the undead in the public eye.

The 21st century continued the interest in vampires. At the movies, Underworld won both fans and detractors, but it was successful enough to launch its own franchise. Writers like Sherrilyn Kenyon and Laurell K. Hamilton had been writing about vampires for years, but it was in the '00's that their work began to overtly influence a number of other writers in both the fantasy and romance genres. Some vampire book series became so popular that they made the leap from paperback originals to hardcover; even Charlaine Harris' "Sookie Stackhouse" novels graduated to hardcover status long before the TV series True Blood aired. Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian landed on the bestseller charts in 2005, prompting yet another round of articles about - you guessed it - the explosion of interest in vampires.

And now, in 2009, vampires are hot. Again. Sheesh. Next time someone mentions it, just nod sagely and wait two more years before the media "discovers" that there is an interest in the subject.